No Choice But You // Ominis Gaunt x Reader

Chapter 48

The Holiday break came and went as quickly as it started, and we were all back in class before we knew it. The students' morale was high after coming back from Christmas, and despite the fact that all the decorations were gone, the cheer could still be felt in the atmosphere. 

With everyone back, the first thing on my mind was figuring out how to get payback on Cressida Blume. 

Sebastian, Anne, Ominis, and I were all gathered in The Undercroft, hashing out plans, trying to come up with the most perfect and humiliating prank we could come up with. 

"Snakes for hair?" Anne suggested. I crinkled my nose, pleased with how perfectly disgusting that sounded, but it wasn't quite good enough. 

"I need more. I need humiliation at his finest and highest," I replied, leaning against Ominis, who had his arm around my shoulder. 

"You know," Sebastian started, leaning forward with a devilish grin on his face. "There's always her diary." 

Oh. 

Oh.

This was good. This was a great start. I remembered her diary from back in fifth year, and all the awful things she'd written about her classmates, and the embarrassing things in there about herself. 

"Doing something with that would be an excellent idea," I exclaim. "But we'd need to do something perfect with it. And we'd have to get our hands on it first." 

"That won't be too difficult," Anne interjected. "She leaves her bag unattended all the time in the library. Just got to fish it out of there when she's not looking." 

"And do what with it?" Ominis chimed in. His fingers stroked shapeless patterns against my shoulder as we sat there, which was a nice, grounding feeling. 

"Oh Merlin," Sebastian whispered as a look of pure excitement crossed his face. "Did you know that Hogwarts used to have a Newspaper club?"

"And why does that apply to this?" Anne asked, quirking her eyebrow at her brother. 

"The old press they used to use is still hidden away on one of the lower levels of the castle," he told us. "If we can manage to nab her diary, we could mass produce a copy of it and pass it out to literally everyone. She won't be coming back from that. If we print enough copies, they'll be finding copies of it lying around the castle for ages after this." 

"This might be the most excellent idea you've ever had," I told him with a grin. "Perfectly humiliating, and even better, there's no way to trace it back to us. And it's not easily undoable with a counterspell, either."

The effects would be perfectly lasting, seeing as we would be printing out physical, non-magical copies of her diary. And like Sebastian had stated, if we made enough, we could leave them everywhere, and-

"We have them delivered with the morning mail," I added quickly as soon as the thought crossed my mind. "We bring them up to the owlery late the night before, and this way, we'll witness everything right as it goes down!" 

"Y/n, that is brilliant," Anne said with a devilish smirk, not unlike the one her brother currently sported. 

* * * 

We'd recruited the help of Poppy and Garreth as well, seeing as it would take a few more of us to be able to carry the papers up to the owlery when we were done printing them. I'd also asked Imelda and Natty, but both had their reasons for not being able to aid us with our endeavor. 

Imelda, and I quote, "admires our cause, but doesn't want to risk a detention over such elementary rubbish," and Natty couldn't risk getting in trouble with her mother since she keeps a pretty close eye on her, which is understandable. 

As Anne had said, getting Cressida's diary was a small task, incredibly easy to get away with in comparison to the things that Sebastian, Ominis, and I had gotten away with in our fifth year (or not gotten away with at the end of things). 

With the six pairs of hands that we had, along with a feather-light charm, we had this in the bag. The only hitch in the plan was figuring out how to work the printing press since it wasn't aided by magic in any way whatsoever. Each letter had to be placed by hand, and then locating the ink for the press was another mission altogether, but by the end of it, we had over a hundred copies of Cressida Blume's precious diary. 

After everything was printed, we had to wait for the ink to dry and bundle up all the pages into their respective groups, then tie them together for easier delivery by the owls. Once everything was said and done and the papers were gathered into burlap sacks, the six of us snuck out of the castle around three in the morning to bring them to the owlery. The walk was long and boring, given the fact that we had to remain mostly silent so as not to alert any teachers of our happenings, but we did it. 

The papers were delivered to the owlery, and we all returned to our respective dorms to catch whatever sleep we could before breakfast. 

I hardly slept a wink because of the devilish excitement coursing through my veins at the thought of seeing her face in the morning. She deserved so so much worse than this, but it was a good start. Humiliating her in front of every student in the school seemed like a good way to begin things. 

In the future, I wouldn't be passing up any other opportunities to prank her, of course. This would only be the beginning. If she had a single friend by the end of this, I would be surprised, considering the awful things that were in there. 

I'd read through the diary before we copied it. There were things about her teachers and many of the students and so many deliciously embarrassing stories and facts about herself. For someone who appears to be so nonchalant on the outside, there are lots of terrible thoughts in her head. If she was any decent, she'd have half a mind to tell these people these things to their faces. But she was a coward, definitely not worthy of the Gryffindor name, but that was neither here nor there. 

I focused on the sheer amount of pleasure I'd get from seeing her wrecked face in the morning and went to sleep with a warm and happy heart.